1Password vs Keycloak

1Password is a password manager for individuals, families and businesses, made by AgileBits, a company founded in 2005 in Toronto, Canada. It is known for a strong security track record, polished apps on every major platform and a design that makes good password habits easy for non-technical people.

1Password stores passwords, passkeys, credit cards, secure notes, documents, SSH keys and software licenses in encrypted vaults that can be shared with family members or colleagues. Data is protected by end-to-end encryption that combines your account password with a locally generated Secret Key. Watchtower flags weak, reused and breached credentials and sites that support passkeys or two-factor authentication, and Travel Mode hides selected vaults when crossing borders. For businesses, plans add SSO with Okta, Microsoft Entra ID and Google Workspace, admin policies, activity reporting, provisioning and free Families accounts for employees. Developer tools include a CLI, an SSH agent, Git commit signing and Secrets Automation for infrastructure. Extended Access Management, built partly on the 2024 acquisition of Kolide, adds device trust and discovery of unmanaged apps.

1Password fits households and companies that want strong security with excellent usability. There is no free plan, only a trial. Bitwarden is the leading open-source alternative with a free tier, Proton Pass suits privacy-focused users, and Dashlane and Keeper compete in the business market.

Keycloak is an open-source identity and access management server, originally created by Red Hat and now a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) incubating project under the Apache 2.0 license. It provides single sign-on for web and mobile applications and APIs using the standard OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0 and SAML 2.0 protocols, and it runs on your own infrastructure.

Its feature set matches commercial identity products: user federation with LDAP and Active Directory, identity brokering with social logins and external identity providers, multi-factor authentication with OTP and WebAuthn, password policies, fine-grained authorization services, realms for multi-tenancy, an admin console and a self-service account console. Login pages and emails can be themed, and extensions are written in Java through service provider interfaces. The software is free; Red Hat sells a supported distribution, the Red Hat build of Keycloak, for organizations that need commercial support.

Keycloak fits enterprises, public institutions and B2B software vendors that need to keep identity data under their own control, for example for data residency or regulatory reasons. The trade-off is operational: running it in high availability, tuning databases and caches, upgrading between major versions and customizing themes require expertise. Startups that want hosted authentication with polished UI components usually choose Auth0, Clerk or WorkOS, while Authentik and Zitadel are newer open-source alternatives with lighter operations.